Opening of A New Building For Americas' Health

PHOTO BY EDWIN LOUREIRO, STAR STUDIOS Streets sprinkled with early autumn drizzle reflect headquarters' glow

Headquarters for
Hemisphere Health
Lights Up

Newest shape in Washington is a gem-like headquarters for Western Hemisphere health, whose sparkle in the city is just three months old.

Neither a box, nor a variant of it, the structure instead is round- and crescent-formed--a dual-unit edifice made up of a 300-seat circular council chamber, and a half-moon-fashioned secretariat ten floors tall.

Catching eyes and turning heads since its formal unveiling September 27, the headquarters is new home for both the Pan American Health Organization, and regional office for the World Health Organization.

Dedication of the headquarters for hemisphere health occurred just two months shy of December 2, the 63rd anniversary of the world's oldest international health agency, an occupant of the new structure.

It was Westen Hemisphere statesmen who gave that agency life. Back in 1902, they voted it a budget of $5,000, for aid to nations in "the destruction of mosquitoes and other vermin," and for staff--but not for an office it could call its own.

A single room, 375 square feet in size for all its 11 employees, in a part of the Pan American Union building was the full measure of the turn-of-the-century office.

In the six decades since then however, it has changed many times over. In 1949, the hemisphere agency became WHO's regional office for the Americas, and in 1950, a specialized body of the Organization of American States.

Thus the new structure is joint headquarters of an inter-American as well as of a United Nations health organization.

This year the two organizations' combined budgets put more than $17 million into some 400 health projects throughout the continent.

And their staff number close to 1,000 public health experts and other international civil servants, of whom 700 are in Latin America and 300 here--the latter housed for the first time under one roof in a permanent home.

Milestones in the building's development are these:

• President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill in March 1960 donating the site, valued then at $1.1 million, as a U.S. gift.

About an acre in size, the land is not far from the Lincoln Memorial, U.S. Department of State, George Washington University, and the proposed site of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, then senators, strongly supported the bill.

• The W. K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, awarded grants in May 1961 and October 1962 totalling $5 million that paid most construction costs.

Under terms of the grant, 23 nations will repay the money over two decades. However, the Foundation has stipulated that repayments be spent on education, training, nutrition and water programs--thus in effect making a reinvestment in health.

• Architect Roman Fresnedo Siri of Uruguay was named winner, in a hemisphere-wide competition to choose the building's design. He received $10,000 first prize October 1961, and soon after became associated with Justement, Elam, Callmer, and Kidd, a prominent Washington, D.C. architectural firm.


• The American Construction Co. Inc., received the $4.5 million building contract in August 1963.


• Dr. Emory W. Morris, Kellogg president, broke ground in official ceremonies September 1963.


• And last September, ranking officials from all hemisphere countries capped developments as they witnessed the symbolic ceremony of presentation of the new headquarters to American nations.

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